An interactive graphic display system such as the chart utility of the IBM Graphics Display Data Manager (GDDM) which is described in EU patent publication No. 26266 gives a user the ability to create graphic pictures on a display screen such as an IBM 3279. (IBM is a Registered Trade Mark). Once created it is often desirable to have a hardcopy of the picture and pen plotters connected to the system are commonly used for this purpose.
Pen plotters provide a cheap, high quality graphics hard copy capability.
However the technology differs from that of a cathode ray tube display in one significant way, once something is drawn, it cannot be erased or changed. This difference presents a problem where, say, a red square is drawn over a larger blue square. On a display, the underlying blue pels are simply changed to red pels, but on a plotter, the red will be drawn over the blue and a muddy brown colour will result. To provide quality output on plotters, it is therefor necessary to alter any underlying areas by clipping out any overlying areas. When the clipped underlying area is drawn and shaded, it will leave blank paper where the overlying areas will subsequently be drawn, resulting in a much more acceptable plot.
Various methods for area clipping have been published. "Reentrant Polygon Clipping", Ivan E. Sutherland & Gary W Hodgman Comm. of ACM January 1974 V17 no. 1 p. 32-42 describe a simple method for clipping a concave polygon to a convex area. This requires a concave clip area to be divided into convex polygons thus increasing the complexity of the calculations. "Hidden surface removal using polygon area sorting" Kevin Weiler & Peter Atherton Siggraph 77 proceedings Computer Graphics 11(2) Summer 77 p. 214 describe another method for clipping concave polygons with holes, but this requires the polygons to be defined in a clockwise direction and holes in an anti-clockwise direction.